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Is it true that we pay Lane Fox £30,000 a year to be digital champion? I thought these posts were generally unpaid and if the tax payer does pay her and she has investments in digital that would seem to be a conflict of interest.

Having said that I heard on Radio 2 Jeremy Vine Show and she was great entertainment and very useful what she said too.

An interesting piece. And of course, a good entrepreneur will keep trying with different ideas when one fails.

Rory,

It was never cool to say you were going to work for a bank.

I used to work for the online food trader/exchange Efdex in 2000, none of us knew what we were doing!

I think we lost £65m in the end when the receivers moved in.

Crazy Days!!!

Was it to do with the eclipse?

I used to work for the company that bought up all of Boo's "mainframe" [yes, I know the word is old fashioned and no, I don't care) computers for their online trade finance system.

The system worked, the company was extraordinarily well funded (USD 100million is the mooted number the parent sank into it) but has never reached the size and scale it was expected to during the dot.bomb boom. It has had multiple owners since those heady days and continues to trade albeit at a smaller scale.

Perhaps those machines were jinxed?

Ian, I also worked for efdex- (you aren't Ian Nundy are you?) it was incredible what they spent setting that company up and terrible that the staff didn't even get paid at the end. Fortunately I left just before that happened.

The biggest problem with the dot-com boom is that now even good businesses with excellent business plans and solid teams are having difficulty reaching the funding they need. Every time my clients and I hit this wall I curse Lastminute.com which was a bad business from the start. The current site bears little resemblance to that simplistic (and often, offline!) startup of yesterday.

But do you really think it's over? Look at Twitter... it's currently burning money like it comes from trees and has no real prospect of making money in its current form (despite its popularity). The founders claimed it would be in the black a year ago - and yet, someone keeps ploughing money into it.

Our pension money probably. I despair.

Ah, if only some of the *real* stories were ever related and not just the fluff the PR people wanted you to see. Happy times ;-)

Don't you think that people that borrow money to hype up the flotation of a valueless, loss-making company are con merchants of the worst sort? They walk away with 'loads of money' leaving the new owners with nothing except possibly the unpaid load to hype the company!

But then some companies like Friends Reunited get hyped for free by the ´óÏó´«Ã½. There were stacks of free sites that let school chums keep in touch but the ´óÏó´«Ã½ kept plugging Friends Reunited until it floated.

Martha Lane Fox is no visionary, yet the ´óÏó´«Ã½ keeps plugging her. Her performance on the recent ´óÏó´«Ã½ 2 series was pathetic and the fact that she gets paid from the public purse is yet another scandal - 'to the rich shall be given, from the poor shall be taken'.

I worked for an personal numbering dotcom back at the turn of the century.
We gave away personal numbers which the user could direct to any phone with an incoming number.
It had millions of pounds investment - then a second, then a third round of funding - even although the product takeup was poor, and most users were not actually using the product. Investors were pouring in the money while pay-as-you-go mobile phone contracts with cheap mobile phone devices springing up on every street corner in front of their noses.

We weren't chasing a noble dream. I don't think many of the dotcom startups were. We were all chasing the IPO.

The theory said it mattered little if few people were actually using the product: the company would make hundreds of pounds on each user somehow, at somepoint in the future.

The key to getting as many users as we possibly could, was being seen wherever we could. Whoever could make it into the public mind was on their way to becoming dot com billionaires.
In this respect, Lastminute.com was the benchmark for us all: you couldn't walk anywhere without seeing or hearing them somehow. I remember walking to a newsagents one day in February 2000. Mathe Lane Fox was on the front cover of the Times, Radio 4 was playing in the shop - they were talking about Lastminute - and coming out of the shop, a Lastminute.com ad-plastered Routemaster bus went sailing past.

We had great fun building an online affiliate network, partnering with many other dotcoms that - retrospectively - didn't have a real chance of manking money. The majority of young entrepreneurs I spoke with were all talking about how close they were to IPO. It was as if nothing mattered to them beyond that point. There were a few exceptions - people who were in it because they really believed their product could revolutionise the world - regardless of how much money it would make them, yet they were the exception to the rule.

Promotion-wise, we did everything else from hiring attractive girls at Paddington Station to give out business cards, to booking ads on the London Tube, to getting on the phone and firing off a press release to whoever we could, whenever we could.

We had swish offices round the corner from Picadilly Circus, a top-flight bunch of senior telecoms technicians providing the back-end, and we loved talking about how well we were doing.

Many strangers thought my colleagues and I were minited. The truth was, I was renting a room in a dingy house in Tottenham. I lived off fish fingers fromthe discount supermarket, and I struggled to pay for my travecard every week. All the money that was ever going to come was going to come from the IPO.

The company I worked for never made the billions the investors all expected. Yet it still exists today as a modestly profitable SME. I felt sorry for our senior technical bods - who had given up long careers with established companies, not to see their gamble pay off.

For those of us lucky enough to be part of it, the pre-burst dotcom bubble was a wonderful cyclone of on-line business optimism, where anything was possible. There were many great people with many ambitious ideas floating around. Some of the ideas never stood a chance of making a real profit - but it mattered less. The important thing was that those who could gave it a go.

I sold boo.com over a million quid worth of services..

When boo hoo came out, he referred to the company I worked for as a company that "Did a bit of web design"

No wonder they went bust if the CEO had such little grasp on how much of his cash was going where..;)

Still, paid for my first proper car, thanks! ;)

boils,

You don't know my friends!

I worked for both boo and lastminute from the start and really could write a book about my time at both. The best experience I could have ever asked for. Even though the business strategies were a tad naïve, the underlying drive behind these companies was good honest people, hard work and great ideas. Some dot coms make it, some don’t, but these were all at the infancy of a technological change to how we all now live our lives. Hats off to the people who gave it a shot.

Decent article.

But completely ignores the privileged background of the people it talks about.

The WHOLE trouble with the UK, is that without that sort of background you cannot get anywhere. (99.99% of the time).

And so WHOLE sections of Society are out. Excluded from the off.

Hence the fractured nature of UK Society.

In other EU countries, ordinary folk can make it. As is the case in the USA, Australia and the like.

I'm about to launch a new "dotcom" and although we are targeting a large and previously untapped market the problem is getting over the start-line with little in the way of startup capital in the bank.

Gone are the days where investors would fight to invest in a domain name regardless of its viability as a business...caution with a sprinkling of skepticism appears to be the name of the game.

It's not easy but I guess going it alone will pay dividends when it all works out!

Hi,

DotCom boom!

I date from well before that. Symbolics.com was the first company to have a .com domain name in 1985. I became involved with Symbolics in 1984 and founded a company called the "Vanilla Flavor Company" (a vanilla flavor is a construct in Lisp -the AI language). In 1985 we had a team of great brains looking for terrorists in airline reservation databases, insider trading, building share portfolios, simulating combat scenarios (still in use), interpreting natural language, extreme programming. All great fun and years ahead of their time.

We all learnt hard lessons about the uptake of technology - much of what we were doing then is only just coming into mainstream applications - as Zhou en Lai said when asked about the impact of the French revolution 'it is too early to tell". Same for the dot.com boom.

You only focus on the big players, many of whom foundered when the bubble burst on the pointy rocks below.
But the dot com boom also fostered innumerable table top companies. These were the one-man-band outfits which were ideally suited to the internet. With a little flair, and some excellent out-of-the-box ecommerce software, a whole new cottage industry has grown up over the last decade. They didn't need multi-millionaire backers - they just used their nouse to get off the ground.
I talk on a daily basis to ecommerce retailers, some of whom have been in this game for 15 years*. Their simple business model means that most of them not only weathered the recession, they thrived on it.
The home-made online retailer has also created a second market in the form of web designers, who make their living by tweaking the out-of-the-box stuff to look individual, fresh and exciting. Have a look at the PlainLazy brand, for starters.
*we're just babies by comparison, having started up in 2001. Happily, going very strong indeed!

Freeserve not only made a massive net contribution to Dixons, and of course to the UK exchequer in taxes paid on that gain, but also radically altered who could afford access to the internet. I admired John Plutero then and do now. Good luck to him and C&W. I think its important to separate those who knew, mostly, what they were doing, from those who just hopped on the bandwagon and invariably crashed and burned. I remember the headline "Poet and Model form Dot Com: Boo is born"! I currently work for [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator] a classic dot com in some senses, but in others it is a very traditional business. It, essentially sells engagement rings with exquisite craftsmanship, and fabulous diamonds, and does this using pretty standard internet technologies and standard good old fashioned retailing. Sure Boo aimd to deliver great product too, but the technology and retailing mistakes they made killed them, and if you lined up a seasoned retail veteran, such as Philip Green, and put a technologist alongside them, I suspect they could have picked the winners and losers from 1,000 yards. Boom and bust is a natural cycle in any market, see George Soros for details. The mistake is thinking the bust is the bad bit.

I clearly remember the day - our e-Commerce venture had miraculously arranged for Martha Lane-Fox and Brent Hoberman to attend as guest speakers for an event we were hosting for our key clients, and it turned out to be the day of the lastminute.com IPO!

It's burned in my memory because I ended up missing the event to tend to the needs of another client. At the time it seemed a crushing blow to miss the meeting, but 10 years certainly provides a bit of perspective...

Hello Rory, Great article . Yes , I was one of those dotcommers and was walking down a street in March 2000 having just sold my shareholding in a domain name company, having floated it in January 2000. In March 2000 it was worth £800M . In October 2000 was worth £4M . However today it has 12 offices globally and 250 employees and probably worth £200M++ . So I guess we found a business model that worked ! Those were truly crazy crazy days . Pure hype.

After 10 years owning High Street retail businesses ( definately NOT the place to be now) I am back in the world of domains , where domain names are virtual real estate and DNS2 is about to start. Yep ICANN , who globally run the internet addressing system are opening up the DNS space . For an application fee of $200K companies, individuals/can have .dot whatevertheylike starting early 2011. Already declared .cities , like london , nyc, berlin , madrid ; .causes - like .green .eco .communities - .sport .basketball.shop and even .royal ( which I intend to roll out) .Nike and .microsoft are rumoured to interested . .canon announced today . The implications are huge .... You will soon find me on Facebook ( wouldnt have believed that 10 years ago !) at Dot Advice .
.... a dream for the marketing people and a nightmare for trademark attorneys

Happy to explain more and come and join me at my Dot Advice Facebook Group.

@14....

Although, your initial point that one needs money to start up a business is a valid point to a certain degree, the second part of your comment isn't exactly true. Social mobility, ie the ability to change social status, is greater in the EU than in the USA.

Not that this discussion is relevant....

Hey Ian,

I have certain questions about efdex, if you would be willing to answer them, mail me at [Personal details removed by Moderator]
Thnx

I agree with snorestore. The dotcom bubble just corrected peoples' expectations of online businesses. These days there are uncountable numbers of successful business and individuals who make money online [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator] either through selling their own niche products and services or through marketing other retailers via affiliate programmes or aggregation. Many of them don't even need or want outside investors and the investors that now exist in the wake of the 'dotcom era' are a more savvy breed with more realistic expectations of what profits can be extracted from different online business models.

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